Break the rules, get the coins: how one man “crashed” a GDC panel

At this year's Game Developers Conference, one man wanted to rant about social …

At the 2011 Game Developers Conference, a number of people working in the social games space were given a panel to rant about the current state of the industry. The interesting bit came at the end: everyone in the audience was given a coin, and the person who was able to collect the most coins from other people would be able to give a surprise "bonus" rant at the end of the panel. It was a way to turn being a passive observer into a game, and author Jane McGonigal wanted to speak.

But someone else thought he could win, and he didn't feel like playing fair.

Break the rules. Get the coins

"I looked around the room at the hundred-or-so delegates and quickly calculated the amount of glad-handing and baby-kissing I'd have to do to amass enough coins to win," Ryan Creighton, founder of game developer Untold Entertainment, wrote in his first-person account of hijacking the speech. "I knew I was up against the likes of Jane McGonigal, who despite being featured in two or three other GDC panels and talks that week AND a recent Colbert Report episode was nonetheless salivating over the chance to grab the mic yet again." He was no match for her "celebrity, eagerness, and feminine wiles."

So he walked up to the person handing out the coins, and told them panelist Chris Hecker only wanted half the coins given out, and he would keep ahold of the rest of the coins. The attendant shrugged, and handed him the bag of coins.

What happened next is being contested by a number of people who were there, and Creighton's account paints him as the wily winner and the rest of the panel as the snarling bad guys. He was labeled a cheat, McGonigal was given the speech, and he was awarded a small micro-rant after McGonigal. She brought up a few friends and gave a good speech, which Creighton also considered a cheat.

McGonigal saw it slightly differently. "Ignore that guy's self-congratulatory POV," she told Ars. "We had explicit permission from both Jason and Eric [Zimmerman]. No cheat."

What's interesting is that I couldn't find any evidence of this stunt in any of the write-ups of the rant panel, and was skeptical any of it took place at all, but McGonigal confirmed it, with caveats. "Every bit of the story about me was essentially wrong, and the rest of it was not as epic as described," she wrote to Ars, with an added smiley face.

Other reports differed in their telling, with Creighton describing the revealing of his coin collection akin to the famous scene in flashdance where Jennifer Beals pours water on herself, and others saying he simply poured the bag out on the floor to make his point.

Creighton was also slightly confused by the lack of attention the story received from the press. "I know—it's weird. I expected someone to talk about it, and when no one did, I wrote it up myself," he explained. He said there are a few accounts filtering around the Web, and noted that at one point the audience chanted "let him rant," when it looked like he may be denied a place in the panel.

Game designer Caroline Himmelman also gave her own take on what happened, and she's less than enthusiastic about Creighton's somewhat hyperbolic account of how things went down. "Cheating is not gaming. When we say we're 'gaming' a system, what we're doing is cheating or exploiting a loophole...," she explained. "I am sad at some of what I've read today. I felt upset that the very well-intentioned, even innocent desire to win a game and a chance to speak at the GDC Social Games Rant has spurred blog posts that tarnish my very fond memory of what I thought was an amazing experience."

So what did Creighton want to say?

The meta-narrative of this story, and how Creighton was able to get in front of the audience and talk, may be the point itself. Did he cheat? Did he deserve to win? He was told to keep his response to ten words or less, but he said he spoke for as long as he wanted. Other people who were there claimed he spoke for around two minutes.

One of his arguments was that Zynga is being unfairly targeted by critics of social gaming. "Zynga is no more culpable for introducing addictive hooks in games than any other developer," he wrote, summing up his thoughts. "At GDC, years before Zynga's triumph, the Casual Games Summit speakers all talked about how they needed to make their games more addictive." His point was that Zynga didn't cheat to get where they are, just like he didn't cheat when he broke the rules of the game to get in front of the audience.

Eric Zimmerman, the host of the panel, told us Creighton's write-up of the event is "more or less correct."

"For all the spectacle, for all the drama, and for making an enormous ass of myself, I don't regret a single moment of it," Creighton wrote. "If anything, bucking convention and winning the coin game reminded me that the greatest gains are made by subversion, disruption, and going against the grain."

What's clear through all the different points of view about what happened during the panel is that this is perhaps the most thought anyone has every put into defending Zynga. "Yes it happened," another source told us. "Pretty much exactly like how he described on his blog. It wasn't that big of a deal to anyone but [Creighton] and Eric [Zimmerman]."

Sometimes grandstanding is only impressive after the event itself. Creighton's website has since gone under from the stress, and he has noted with some irony that he wishes he were selling something to take advantage of this publicity.